Map showing the location of King's Landing on the continent of Westeros.

King's Landing is the capital of the Seven Kingdoms. It is located on the east coast of Westeros, overlooking Blackwater Bay. It is the site of the Iron Throne and the Red Keep, the seat of the King of the Andals and the First Men. The walled city is located on uplands just north of where the Blackwater Rush flows into Blackwater Bay. It enjoys a warm climate and life there is luxurious for those that can afford it. The city is overpopulated and dangerous at the best of times despite being policed by a City Watch.[1]

King's Landing was founded by King Aegon I Targaryen. He established a small wooden fort atop the hill - which was later named after him - where his ships first landed from Dragonstone, and used this as a base for his campaign to conquer the continent. Having achieved his goal, he established the new capital on the site of his original fort. The city expanded rapidly under his descendants.[1] By the time of Robert's Rebellion, the city had a population of approximately half a million people.[2]

During the War of the Five Kings, the problems in King's Landing have multiplied. The worst of these is the food shortages. Added to this, there has been an influx of refugees into the city seeking the protection of the city walls from the war.

Behind the scenes

Production Designer Gemma Jackson described the conception of the overall look for King's Landing by saying that, "When I was thinking about King's Landing, the whole red aspect of it, that immediately made me think of Rajasthan", which is the northwest region of India.[7]

The exterior shots of King' Landing in Season 1 were filmed in Malta. In Season 2, new filming locations for King's Landing were found in Croatia, specifically in the seaside castle-town of Dubrovnik.

In the books

In the A Song of Ice and Fire novels, King's Landing is the largest city in Westeros, with a population of roughly half a million. It is built around three tall hills: Visenya's Hill, Rhaenys's Hill and Aegon's Hill. The Red Keep is the primary fortress and redoubt of the city, located atop Aegon's Hill behind several inner walls.

King's Landing was rapidly constructed within the first century of rule by the Targaryen dynasty. This rapid expansion didn't keep pace with organized "city-planning", resulting in numerous slums forming such as the district known as Flea Bottom. Many of these slum districts are poorly organized, ugly, and filthy because their placement wasn't thought out during the rush to slap down new buildings. In contrast, the second largest city in Westeros, Oldtown in the Reach, is thousands of years old, but grew only in incremental steps which were well planned out beforehand, resulting in it being a much better organized and beautiful city without the squalid slums of King's Landing, while being only slightly smaller than the capital itself.

Aegon I fortified his initial landing point at the northern shore of the mouth of the Blackwater River, a strategically very defensible position protected to the east and south by water, and surrounded by open plains which would expose any attacking army long before it arrived. After the conquest, Aegon ruled for some time at the crude boomtown which sprang up there, known as Aegonfort. However, it remained a ramshackle pile of wood and earth, so after some time he moved his seat back to Dragonstone, until such time as a proper new capital city could be built in the former location of Aegonfort. He had Aegonfort razed, while planning and construction of King's Landing continued. By the time Aegon I died, however, only the foundations of the city and tunnels of the future Red Keep were finished (thus apparently Aegon continued to rule from Dragonstone for the rest of his life, though he always intended to move the royal seat back to the mainland some day). The city was only finished during the reign of Aegon's second son, Maegor the Cruel. The Iron Throne itself, however, was not taken to Dragonstone, because it was too big to move - keeping in mind that the Iron Throne in the books is a massive 30 foot tall construct literally made out of thousands of swords.[8]

In the TV series, King's Landing is presented as having a warm, Mediterranean or even a sub-tropical climate, and outdoor scenes set in King's Landing are filmed in Mediterranean locations such as Malta and Croatia. Author George R.R. Martin has noted this isn't quite the same as in the books, where it has more of a temperate climate, saying: "King's Landing, that's the capital, is not quite so tropical - in the books it's more like medieval Paris or London."[9] According to the production team in Season 1 behind-the-scenes featurettes, the change in climate was made because they wanted to emphasize how much more lush and abundant King's Landing is compared to Winterfell. It's quite possible that the TV city's climate is far less comfortable in winter.